Teens often play sports and work out with the dream of being a famous athlete, or at least to be popular in school.

Gilbert Garcia, Adams State College student

Gilbert was a body builder largely because he needed to be strong enough to help his grandfather.

When Gilbert was 11, his grandfather, Juan Ortega, had a stroke and lost the ability to walk.

Gilbert always helped his grandfather, but when he turned 15 he started bathing him and carrying him. He could do it because he lifted weights, his mother Melissa Rodarte said.

Juan Ortega called Gilbert “my big fella.”

He wanted to help people like his mother, a medical assistant, had always done. Also, a male nurse had for years cared for his grandfather and Gilbert admired him. He wanted to help people in the same way.

Though he was hampered by dyslexia, he studied hard and went to Adams State College in Alamosa on a scholarship. He enrolled in the nursing program. He was the first one from his family to ever go to college.

Gilbert’s views about life were different than many of the other kids. Though gangs were running throughout the Cole neighborhood, he stayed clear while attending Bishop Machebeuf Catholic High School in Denver.

“His favorite saying was, ‘We have two strikes against us. We’re Hispanic males and we have to go to college,’ ” his grandmother Yolanda Ortega said.

When he was a child growing up in Los Angeles, Byron Lynn Parker loved playing basketball and listening to West Coast rap.

He idolized Tupac Shakur, the popular rap artist gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996.

Byron “Winkie” Parker plays with neice

Parker’s favorite song was a 1994 hip hop tune called “Back in the Days” by Ahmad. The song now makes his aunt, Darlene Harris, who helped raise Parker, very sad.

“That song always brings tears to my eyes,” she said.

The lyrics call her back to her fun-loving nephew’s childhood:

Back in the days when I was young — I’m not a kid anymore
But some days I sit and wish I was a kid again…
But let me finish this reminiscin’ and tellin’
Bout when girls was bellin’ tight corduroys like for the boys
Basket weaves, Nike Court Airs, and footsie socks
And eatin’ pickles, with tootsie pops…

Sonnenfeld traveled to Argentina in 2003 after murder charges against him were filed then dismissed because of insufficient evidence. In Argentina, he fell in love with Paula Duran, married her and has stayed ever since, working as a videographer. He has twin 3-year-old daughters.

When Denver authorities filed murder charges against him for a second time the following year and had him arrested, he fought extradition. An Argentina federal judge and the nation’s supreme court have rejected Denver’s repeated attempts to extradite, citing concern about Colorado’s death penalty.

Sonnenfeld wrote a book, which was published in May called “El Perseguido,” in which he claims U.S. authorities have hunted him for what he knows about 9/11.

Sonnenfeld has been quoted as saying that U.S. government operatives conspired with Denver prosecutors to file false murder charges to destroy his credibility, knowing he has evidence U.S. authorities had a hand either in allowing 9/11 to happen or actually participated in the airliner attacks.

Joining Sonnenfeld’s cause have been a juggernaut of advocates including people close to Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and a dozen human rights groups.

In a series of e-mail exchanges, Sonnenfeld did not explain how his videotapes of Trade Center ruins prove U.S. complicity in 9/11, but he did amply rebut evidence presented in an arrest warrant affidavit by Denver homicide detectives.

Amy Ahonen’s black 2005 Jeep Liberty was found abandoned in Clear Creek Canyon near the side of Highway 6 in Jefferson County.

It was near the Mayhem Gulch Trail, a well-traveled scenic route where people often leave their cars to go hiking or rafting.

Amy Ahonen, 37

Ahonen’s roommate, Kim McDaniel, had seen her around 1 p.m. that day, Friday, July 8, 2011, the day before her 38th birthday.

Her sister Andrea Ahonen said Amy was expected at work at Red Lobster at 6 p.m. that day.

A passerby saw Amy’s Jeep on the side of the highway and called the Colorado State Patrol, according to one report.

Officials with the Colorado State Patrol also indicated that she called 911 asking for help with her vehicle that night.

But when a trooper arrived, Ahonen reportedly told him that she didn’t need any help.

That was the last recorded contact with Ahonen. She never made it home.

Ahonen’s roommate reported her missing two days later on Sunday. Jefferson County and Colorado State Patrol officers returned to the area and found her jeep abandoned.

The following day on Monday, Alpine Rescue Team members searched Clear Creek, which was swollen from recent rains and snow melt. The concern was that if Amy accidentally fell into the fast moving creek it would be difficult to find her remains.

Ahonen had moved to Colorado with her husband five years earlier. They were later divorced without having any children.

The circumstances were suspicious to family members. Did she waive off the trooper because a tow truck was on the way? Unfortunately there are only questions and few answers.

Nicolas Ferrel-Ibarra was a reporter in Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a journalist.

Nicolas Ferrel-Ibarra, 35

Only eight other countries around the world including Iraq have had more journalist murders than Mexico, according to Committee to Protect Journalists, an international advocacy group.

Since 1992, the organization confirmed that 28 reporters, editor and photographers have been murdered directly because of their work as journalists in Mexico. Another 41 journalists in the country had been killed during the same span of time, but the motive of the murders had not been confirmed, CPJ reports.

By comparison, there have been only five journalists killed in the U.S. since 1992 including Manuel de Dios Unanue, a reporter for El Diario/La Prensa, who was gunned down on March 11, 1992, in New York City.

Ferrel-Ibarra first worked as a journalist in the border city of Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, where two journalists have been killed since the Mexican Drug War flared up in 2007.

A colleague of his, Armando Rodriguez Carreon, 40, was a crime reporter for El Diario de Ciudad Juárez.

Armando Rodriguez, 40

Before his murder on Nov. 13, 2008, in Ciudad Juárez, Carreon spoke with a representative of CPJ about the hazards of working as a journalist in the violent city engulfed in a drug war. Carreon had been receiving threats on a routine basis.

“The risks here are high and rising, and journalists are easy targets,” Rodríguez told CPJ. “But I can’t live in my house like a prisoner. I refuse to live in fear.”

An “unidentified assailant” gunned down Rodríguez as the veteran crime reporter sat in a company sedan in the driveway of his home. Rodríguez’s eight-year-old daughter, whom he was preparing to take to school, watched from the back seat.

Days before he was murdered, Rodríguez had written an article accusing a local prosecutor’s nephew of having links to drug traffickers, according to CPJ.

The unknown robber targeted a gathering place in Denver for men who had risked their lives for their country.

The day was Thursday, Feb. 17, 1972, a time when Democrat candidates for president were largely trumpeting their opposition to President Richard Nixon’s stance on the Vietnam War.

One candidate, Sen. George McGovern, told families of American prisoners in North Vietnam that if he was elected he would announce an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Indochina within 90 days, end support for the current Saigon government and then press for return of POWs.

Anti-war protests had turned into riots across the nation. Protesters called veterans returning home from tours in Vietnam baby killers at airports.

Nixon on that day was embarking on a trip to China to meet with Premier Mao Tse-tung.

40-year-old John Robert Bruns and his wife, Lorein, who lived on the 1100 block of Logan Street, had gone on a date at Lowry Post No. 501 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The couple left the VFW club at 10:45 p.m. and walked to their in the car parking lot at 1825 Welton St.

A man walked into the lot from the east side, then circled back to the Bruns’ car, moved up along the left rear and swung open the door on the driver’s side.

A recent Denver police report indicates that Bruns did not recognize the man who suddenly opened his car door, according to a Denver Post article that ran on Feb. 18, 1972.

“Shortly after Mr. Bruns entered his vehicle, he was confronted by an unknown suspect,” the report says.

But the ballerina’s size was likely due to her fitness. She was known to work out hours on end in the summer.

Jennifer Douglas, 17(Courtesy of Familes of Victims of Homicide and Missing Persons)

Jenny was 5-feet tall and weighed only 87 pounds. She had blue eyes and blonde hair.

Jenny was at home at 2575 Albion Street when she called her mother, Ann, at work around 10 a.m. on July 16, 1984.

Jenny let her mother know that she was going for a bike ride on the Highline Canal. She was a serious biker who would often take rides as far south as Castle Rock. She could cover 60 miles in a single workout.

It wasn’t unusual for her to let her parents know what she was doing.

Jenny was very dependable, a good student at East High School and a devoted ballerina. She was excited about entering her senior year in high school that fall. The following week she was to appear in a ballet performance. She was looking forward to the event.

Jenny’s 13-year-old brother Jonathan saw her riding her bicycle at about 10 a.m., only a few minutes after Jenny spoke with her mother. She was riding her bike south on Albion, just after she left her home.

A janitor at Philips Elementary School, 6550 E. 21st Ave., saw her that Monday morning on Monaco Parkway. She was headed north on her brand new black Univega 12-speed bike.

Forty years ago The Denver Post had a feature similar to Denver Crime Stoppers.

The newspaper offered rewards for information leading to arrests of murder suspects, rapists and escaped convicts.

The program was called “Secret Witness.” As of April of 1972 the newspaper had offered eight rewards for information leading to arrests of tawdry suspects like the so-called “gentleman rapist.”

“This man is believed by police to have raped up to 100 women in the Denver area,” says a story about the reward in The Denver Post about the suspect believed to be between 19 and 30.

“He often threatens his victims with a knife, but has been dubbed a gentleman because he is polite, uses good grammar and expresses concern about the protection of his victims against pregnancy. He is described as white, soft-spoken, dark-haired with thin lips, long, thin fingers with long fingernails.”

On April 9, 1972, The Denver Post ran a Secret Witness story under the headline: Who Killed Mother of Sleeping Baby?

The story, which ran without a byline, appeared as follows:

In one corner of the dining room inside the little brick house were Christmas presents, gaily wrapped and ready to be placed beneath a tree.

Sleeping peacefully in her bedroom crib was a baby girl, named Shan Dale Simpson by her adoring mother.

On the floor of the bedroom of the small house at 2249 Lafayette St. was Shan Dale’s mother. She, too, was quiet. But she wasn’t sleeping.

Kathleen Garcia had just finished working a graveyard shift from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., plus an additional hour of overtime.

Kathleen Garcia, 24

She and partner William Stoops patrolled an area bracketed by Federal and Sheridan boulevards from West 38th to West 52nd Avenues. Stoops was a veteran officer, assigned to train Garcia.

Garcia and Stoops had taken a late emergency call and didn’t check out of the District 1 police station at 2195 Decatur St. until 4:09, according to a news article by now-retired police reporter Harry Gessing, who had worked at The Denver Post for decades.

The 24-year-old rookie had been on the job for six weeks, having graduated from the Denver Police Training Academy on Feb. 6, 1981.

Garcia was a good worker, who was well liked and had nothing but good reports, Capt. Don Mulnix, who supervised Denver police detectives, told Gessing.

Garcia was a very idealistic police recruit, who had always dreamed of becoming a police officer. She was very serious about her work and didn’t complain about difficult hours or a challenging patrol area.

She was still dressed in her crisp new police uniform when she drove into the South Denver neighborhood where she had grown up and attended South High School.

Garcia was still living with her folks and three of her five sisters at 2398 S. Galapago, but had recently rented an apartment and was planning to move into the apartment in three days.

It hadn’t been that long since she had paid a lot of money for a large quantity of supplies she needed to enforce the law and to protect the public and herself.

Garcia had purchased a night stick, two guns, a flashlight and a leather holster and belt.

Garcia was proud of her accomplishments, her mother would tell Gessing.

After driving home early that morning, Garcia parked on the West Wesley Avenue side of her home about 20 feet from the front gate and opened her car door. It was 4:26 a.m. Saturday morning, March 28, 1981.

Someone darted up to her out of the darkness. There was a loud, brief argument, then a struggle.

Former Denver Police detective Lt. Jon Priest displays three binders he kept in his office that comprised a synopsis of 75,000 documents stored in police archives that were collected during investigations from the 1991 United Bank robbery. (Denver Post file)

5:04 a.m., Father’s Day, 1991.

An alarm sounds in the hallway of the subbasement at the United Bank building — now Wells Fargo — at 17th Avenue and Lincoln Street in Denver.

Something or someone in a storage room on the subbasement level triggered the alarm.

A light appears on a board in a monitor room on the Concourse level, one floor below street level.

William Rogers McCullom Jr., 33, or Phillip Lee Mankoff, 41, presumably turns the alarm off, almost immediately. The alarm was never turned back on.

At 7:30 a.m., guards from Wells Fargo and Loomis Armored Inc. arrive at United Bank to make weekend deposits from stores, bars and restaurants. Because of holiday gift buying the bags of money are heavier than most weeks.

Then at 9:14 a.m., a man standing at a door where freight is delivered into the building buzzes the guards.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.